Cover Crops report 2018

Cover crops in vining peas – some results from our second year trials

Good soil health and structure are important for growing vining peas successfully. Intensive production can lead to structural issues like compaction of soils and can lead to soil microbial communities that contain larger numbers of plant pathogens and less beneficial microbes. One option to improve soil health and structure is the use or cover crops (defined as being planted in late summer in between cash crops and grown over winter to provide cover for soils) and catch crops (defined as being planted after harvest of cash crop and incorporated in autumn before planting a winter sown cash crop).

PGRO, The Green Pea Company and Birds Eye have committed to a long term project to investigate the effects of cover and crops on soil health in vining pea rotations. Results from the first year of trials have been reported in the Vegetable Magazine 2017 edition.

Here, some results from the second year of field trials are shown. Published in the Vegetable Magazine Winter 2018 (Official publication of the PGRO) https://www.pgro.org/veg-ebook-2018/mobile/index.html

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